Flesh and Blood
by Valieara
Summary: Post The Truth. Flesh and blood, blood and tears. Margaret wanted to take the last ten years back. A long, hard look at Dana Scully through her mother's eyes.


**Disclaimer:** _The X-Files_ belongs to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions. The snippet of a song is John Mayer's _Daughters. _There is no gain here, monetary or otherwise.

**Spoilers:** Set sometime after _The Truth._

**Notes:** This isn't an episode tag, in and of itself. I didn't like _The Truth._ I really didn't. But I doubt seriously that there was no last contact between Scully and her mother - either before she left or afterward. Her prophetic dream way back in _Ascension_ nagged at me, and a difficult birth ensued. After re-teaching myself how to write over the course of the last four months, I feel a certain fondness for this piece. Feedback would be loved and much appreciated. Thanks all!

* * *

_Girls become lovers_

_Who turn into mothers_

_So mothers, be good to your daughters, too_

_

* * *

_

It was odd how certain things, little things, impacted one in the moments just before a crisis, before memories had had the chance to be painfully distorted by the _after_. Yet the present tinted the past and future forever, changing the unique shades of perception as often as a slight movement would change a kaleidoscope.

Dana had always said things like that, the most secretively profound of her children by far, and as Maggie walked through the living room to the front door, she thought there was a whisper of Dana in her mind. Above the mantelpiece, a six year old Melissa and a four year old Dana held each other at a beach behind the gold frame and glass; on the coffee table sat an envelope addressed to Dana; on the message machine was Dana's voice saying words she couldn't comprehend; in her dreams Dana ran.

She and Missy, always close, seemed to be sharing a secret as they watched her from their frozen eyes, trapped by the glass. _You'll find out,_ they seemed to say_, whether we tell you or not. _Next to them, an older Missy's dress blew in the wind, as she looked out from the shore, waiting for someone, something – a stark contrast to the sharpness and hardness of Bill Scully in a navy uniform, Dana Scully in a dress suit; piercing stares and bright blue eyes to bright red hair. A card remained unsigned on the coffee table, the envelope half-addressed, as if the writer had paused and reconsidered. Half finished thoughts whispered at her from her living room.

Dana watched, Dana spoke, Dana ran.

Dana.

She turned away, slightly disturbed, and resolved to try and call Dana at home again after she dealt with whoever was at the door.

"Margaret Scully?"

A tall, balding severe man stood upright on her doorstep, looking as if it took all his energy to remain so. There was pity and sorrow in his eyes, if she looked closely enough, but not in his face, in his voice, or his posture. Maggie had seen him before, she thought.

It came to her as a snow covered field, dotted with grey headstones, not so unlike the one she'd bought her daughter seven years before; in Dana collapsing in tears into this man's arms. His bearing and appearance were the same, and suddenly Maggie hoped that it was just his way.

Dana cried, Dana _burned_.

Maggie jumped.

"Yes, may I help you?" she asked, her heart pounding.

"You may not remember me," he began gruffly, "I'm Assistant Director Walter Skinner – I was your daughter's superior, and I hope I was also considered a friend."

But Maggie's mind had caught on one word, one verb, the difference of which between present and past was as weighty as that between life and death.

"Dana," she breathed.

It was a June day when she was told her daughter was dead, cool and lusty and unnatural. A long overdue Mother's Day card sat on the coffee table, destined to remain forever unaddressed and forever unread.

She felt her daughter's grief too late, she thought, when her own assaulted her in the middle of the night.

* * *

Above all things, Margaret Scully believed in God and her family, holding herself to be first and foremost a Christian and a mother. Neither were to be taken lightly, both holding an ultimate responsibility she'd hoped she'd instilled in her children, and one she'd hoped they would instill in their own. 

_Flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood._

She'd set up a picture of Dana and William on her nightstand a while ago, after Dana had given her son up, in an inability to understand why she had or how she could bear to willingly part from her child forever when Dana had offered no explanations; in almost an inability to forgive it; in a desperate attempt to try to understand in a time filled without Dana, who didn't call or come to mass. It had all happened so quickly, and the aftermath of the whirlwind that took less than a week to pass through left her dizzy and out of the loop. In less than a week, her daughter had gone from a mostly happy mother to a woman with perpetually sad eyes. In less than a week, Maggie had lost a grandson.

And hesitantly, not knowing whether it was something her now-distant daughter would want, she bought a Mother's Day card in early May, and because of her hesitation, never sent it.

It had been an aching return to four years ago and a little girl named Emily, who had seemed like a ghost, and who was as fleeting as one. Emily had been a throwback to the past, of a three-year-old Melissa and an eight-year-old Bill, a Christmas that her husband had for once been home and she had been pregnant with a child she would name Dana. It was a throwback to losing Melissa all over again, of hospitals and machines and endless waiting. Maggie had refused to get attached, and waited for the word.

It was a detachment that was irreversible when the other shoe dropped, and Dana's illusion became reality; when she closed off, and alone, had watched first the ghost of her sister, and then her child and all hopes of motherhood be torn away from her.

And all Maggie had ever known of Emily was Dana's grief and a haunting picture.

And like Melissa, as she slipped away, she was surrounded by hospitals and machines, unaware of those around her. She had slipped an arm around her the first Sunday she'd shown up for mass afterward.

"She was a miracle that wasn't meant to be," Dana had said quietly, and it was all she had ever said of Emily again, at least to her. Maggie was left wondering what had been done to her while she'd been missing those few terrifying months that she'd had a child she hadn't known about – and more terrible, what she knew Dana had come to remember about it and never talked of.

It made William's conception all the more impossible to understand, all the harder to comprehend, and she knew Dana had been on the brink of denying it, faced with Fox's mysterious abduction and the fact that three years before, she had been told it was impossible. But he was born healthy and whole: her miracle; a miracle that for once, for her, was meant to be.

The picture was one of the earlier ones, he still a tiny thing cradled in her daughter's arms, she beaming radiantly with a new mother's glow, a particular beauty Maggie had been afraid for a long time that her daughter would never have or experience. She stared at the picture of two loved ones far beyond her reach, and tried to go to sleep, the image burned in the back of her mind.

* * *

_Light rays; warmth piercing through the cold and blankets; a warm hand jostling her shoulder, small, delicate._

"_Mom?"_

_It isn't the small child's voice she's expecting, but strong and soft and her grown daughter's. She sits up. "Dana?" she asks sleepily. "What's wrong?"_

_This is not the Dana that was, but the Dana that is, short even in her three inch pumps and bright red hair highlighted by the sun behind her, almost a silhouette, careworn lines creasing her face as they had begun to crease Maggie's own at that age. Dana is a contradiction in her bearing and her existence in this state, but in this skewed reality, this vision, it's natural, and goes unquestioned._

_Maggie looks down blearily at her daughter, who leans over her, concerned, to feel her forehead with the back of her hand; playing doctor even then at so young an age._

"_You want breakfast in bed?"_

_Her daughter leans over her, stroking back her hair, and that's when Maggie notices that the scene from so long ago had changed; roles had been switched, and youth had gone. _

_And Maggie remembers somewhere in the back of her mind that her daughter is dead._

"_Dana?" she asks again, stricken._

_She smiles. "I'm fine."

* * *

_

Maggie woke up, startled, to Dana's smiling face and a faint memory of baby coos; though whose, she couldn't say.

* * *

Margaret Scully crept into her daughter's apartment. The landlord was kind enough in allowing her time, saying she'd been a wonderful woman and everyone liked having an FBI agent in the building; a confident, competent woman. 

On her way up the stairs, Maggie spitefully thought it was ironic, and just as quickly felt sorry for it.

Her key scraped the lock as she inserted and turned it slowly, hearing the gentle _click_ in the silence that let her in, the door swinging forward: a silent welcome, dark and mocking.

The clock still ticked, much like the sun still shined, a reminder that time would march relentlessly on no matter what had happened because of it. The air conditioning had been turned off, and in the hot, stifling room, Dana's favorite perfume still lingered faintly. The plants had wilted and almost died themselves.

She turned away from the main living area and went into the bathroom, where hair and facial products stared back at her in neat lines and groups, where mascaras and blushes and eyeshadows rested and an unused box of red hair dye sat out as a spur of the moment reminder. Walking back into the bedroom, stale sunlight poured through the window; the bed was unmade, the covers thrown up in a rush; a framed picture of Dana and Fox and William sat on the nightstand, much as a similar one did in hers. In the closet hung a row of impeccably serious dress suits, jeans and casual shirts to one side, high heels and pumps and a pair of sandals and tennis shoes on the floor, a man's dress shirt thrown in the corner on top of them.

She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the feeling of displacement and unreality the sunlight was making her feel.

_I'm alright._

Her eyes opened.

She wandered back out, almost in a daze, avoiding the nursery she could see from here Dana hadn't torn down. New carpet since she'd last been here, she registered vaguely.

But then, there had been blood, so much blood. Dana slid down a wall in front of her eyes, her gun forced from her trembling hands. Wild eyes; baby cries; her daughter's hysteria. _I'll kill you!_ she'd shouted, and meant it.

_I'll kill you if you touch my baby!_

In that moment, Maggie had expected no less of her. It was something she could understand – but not something she'd ever wanted to see. Not in herself, not in anyone, and certainly not in her baby girl.

It had been the first time she'd seen her daughter kill someone.

Dana, with a bloodied face and bloodied hands, had examined the still-living man cursorily, but nothing more. Latching on to her son as much as he clung to her, she'd avoided Maggie's eyes as she murmured about making a cold compress for her mother's face.

Shaken, Maggie declined, going into the kitchen and setting about making her own. Dana retreated into the bloodbath of a nursery, and it had taken everything in Maggie not to leap up and pull William out of her arms. It wasn't right. A man lay dying in the other room and she did nothing to stop it, and all the while, she kept her son with her.

Dana's screams, guttural and desperate, echoed in her mind, where she'd sat on the sofa then and where she stood now. It had been the only thing that stopped her. She'd been all too ashamed and relieved to escape with William and Monica Reyes from Dana's edgy smiles and suppressed sobs.

Maggie sighed, and carried in the moving boxes she hadn't bothered to unfold and set up yet. It was as good a place as any to start, and she supposed the bigger items she'd call a moving service to bring to her own house for the Salvation Army to pick up or join another dead daughter's belongings and memories in the attic.

Three hours later, Dana's bathroom and bedroom had been cleaned out down to a bare mattress and two emptied end tables, and Maggie moved the fifteen boxes she'd filled into the living area and collapsed on the sofa. A mother shouldn't have to outlive her children. She shouldn't have to go through it alone.

A simple pink card peeked at her from the corner of her eye, resting on the end table: _For a special mother..._

She picked it up with interest, tears pricking at her eyes.

_He lives in your heart. You are a mother. _

_Love, Monica_

The sentiments echoed her own, sitting lonely on the coffee table at her house half-written, their right to be the first read taken away by this woman, and Maggie's own foolishness and hesitation. She took off her outer shirt, leaving her in a simple camisole, and lay down on the couch, surrounded and oppressed in the heat by Dana, who danced as a little girl on the back of her eyelids, gazed seriously at her as an adult, and smiled deliriously as a mother surrounded by her friends and family, holding her child.

She slept as deliriously in the heat as Dana had smiled; and in her dreams Dana cried as a mother – a childless one.

_Flesh of my flesh_...

She and her daughter blurred.

* * *

Her dreams shifted, morphing without her will or consent into something more benign, less graphic and heartrending, until all she was left with when she woke up were emotions and imprints of images. Melissa watched Dana from far away, on a nondescript shoreline; Dana smiled at her. _You'll find out_.

* * *

It had been a long day, and from where she sat, she couldn't see anything beyond Dana's furniture cluttered in the space in her living room. It was dark, and she was tired physically, mentally, and emotionally, and she wanted to hear her daughter's voice, even if it was through an answering machine telling her that Dana couldn't come to the phone right now.

She was mid-dial before she realized that she wouldn't get a signal, that she herself had disconnected Dana's home phone and cancelled her cell phone. She'd slammed her finger down on the button to release Dana's pleas and her own anger and helplessness, and buried her face in her hands. The red _1_ on the machine stopped blinking, and she wasn't sure whether it was more a relief for herself or the part of Dana trapped on this machine, crying to be heard.

"_Mom"_

How one word could hold so much helplessness and sorrow was beyond Margaret's ability to comprehend, but there she was next to her answering machine, listening and understanding, for the first time:

Dana had known.

"_I know things are... strange... between us, and I'm sorry I haven't called. But I need to talk to you"_

It was a pleading desperation for more than forgiveness; for mother's counsel; a rushing reminder of a time nearly two years ago and one of the last times Dana had called her, forgetting that on Wednesdays Maggie unfailingly went to Mass. Her voice had been filled with as much helplessness as it had as a little girl lost in the grocery store, and as much as it did now. The first time she'd called back, worried as every mother would be, Dana agreed almost immediately to drive over, and with her daughter's head resting on her shoulder, she found out simultaneously that Dana was pregnant and that Fox had disappeared.

The second time she'd returned the call, it had never been answered. Two weeks later Mr. Skinner arrived on her doorstep.

Dana's breath on the machine was ragged; there were serious mumblings in the background and Dana took a moment to murmur back to them, and listen intently at her end again for an answer.

"_God, mom, please pick up"_

A break.

"_I love you"_

And a click.

Dana ran; Dana died.

_I love you too,_ Maggie cried, but it was too late for last words, and she cried undignified and uncaring on the countertop as the machine blinked relentlessly back at her again.

* * *

They'd held a memorial; an empty grave was buried in their church's cemetery. Mr. Skinner had come, and asked her if he could extend the invitation to two others: Monica Reyes and John Doggett, fellow FBI agents. She'd met them once or twice before, already. Monica was tall and brunette, and sincere; there was something about her that reminded Maggie of Missy, but that was ridiculous. Missy had been on her mind nearly as much as Dana in the last few weeks, and this was just a manifestation of her grief over not one, but two daughters, now far out of her reach. In the back of her mind, Maggie remembered a lone Mother's Day card, and wondered if this was the same _Monica_. The man, John Doggett, was strong, and straightforward; he didn't say much beyond that he'd had great respect for her daughter, because there wasn't much else _to_ say, and she appreciated it. Much like him, Mr. Skinner approached her with a brief but heartfelt _I'm sorry for your loss_, and Maggie felt that it was his loss too. 

She liked them all, and could easily see Dana working alongside them, forming bonds Maggie could only guess at. They stood together to the side, a wall of strength, of stoic faces.

Fox was not there, but from Dana's explanation nearly a year ago, she hadn't expected him to be. She felt the lack of his strength and support keenly, even knowing that he himself would be as devastated as she was. He was an obvious man when it came to Dana, and Maggie didn't know whether to find it endearing and sweet or dangerous and maddening. At this point, she had to remind herself, it didn't matter.

Maggie had never questioned whether or not Dana's child was also Fox's, even though neither of them had ever mentioned it one way or the other. It was in the way they looked at each other; in the way he'd held his child; in the way Dana had had a framed picture of the three of them on her nightstand, the first thing she'd see before she went to sleep and after she woke up.

Referring to William as _her_ son was understandable, considering how much of it she'd gone through by herself, without Fox. It was a cycle: birth, life, death; and the loneliness of it all had just become part of it. Dana mothered alone; Maggie grieved alone.

Dana suckled on a milk bottle in her mother's arms; Dana fed her child in her own.

Dana cried, screams from a tiny body in a crib and wracking sobs from an adult's on the floor of an empty nursery.

Dana.

_Blood of my blood._

Bill and Charlie were there, with their wives and children, and Bill stayed for a week – a gesture she should have found comforting, but found more awkward as the week passed than anything. Maggie had always been convinced that it was through the realization that he could and had hurt his littlest sister that he became so overprotective when she reached her teens and adulthood, something he'd never done with Melissa, and something he'd never admit to either way. She knew Dana had found it little better than the bullying when she was four, having her pigtails pulled and her pets threatened by her eleven year old brother. Tara was a little better, never having known her sister-in-law that well; but she was willing to listen, and Maggie was grateful, but didn't, and truly couldn't, take her on her offers to talk.

Dana's frozen smile mocked her as she crawled into bed. Blood congealing on the side of her face, Dana kissed her son's forehead; tears streaming down her face, she buried herself in Maggie's arms. Flesh and blood, blood and tears. Maggie wanted to take the last ten years back.

* * *

_She didn't know what had woken her up, but it had jarred her wide awake. The Christmas tree lights made the hall glow in quiet anticipation._

_Or not so quiet. Vague whispers floated as ethereally as the glow, and she supposed it was late enough to get up and add the final piece to the nativity. _

_It wasn't so odd to walk into the living room in the small hours of Christmas morning and find her daughters had beaten her; in fact, it was more a ritual than anything. She rounded the corner, cradling the clay Christ child in her hand, expecting to stumble upon Melissa and Dana sitting on the couch, discussing what she was sure was Dana's recent decision to join the FBI. _

_"Hey," she said softly, and was surprised to find herself not in one of the old living rooms._

_Dana and Melissa still looked away from their low conversation and toward her at her voice, and smiled, framed by sunlight and wind and sand and the never-ending crashing of waves behind them. Beneath Melissa's crystal hung a cross, nearly hidden under her flowered dress. An identical one hung on a shorter chain in the hollow of Dana's throat._

_Maggie looked around in astonishment. "What... I don't..."_

_"Hi, mom," said Melissa, and hugged her – something she'd never expected to feel again. Her eyes closed, overwhelmed and disbelieving, and opened only to find Dana smiling at her a few feet away, barefooted and tinier than them all as her feet sank in the sand._

_"I don't understand," Maggie said, nearly on the verge of tears, again._

_Melissa looked at her seriously and tilted her head, and Dana mirrored her pose. "You've always said," Dana replied, walking toward her slowly, arms hugging herself, "that the dead aren't lost to us. That they still communicate with us."_

_"But... how?"_

_"Well," Dana said, looking slyly at Melissa, "consider who's here."_

_"I am the family mystic," Missy said, grinning. "Or had you forgotten?"_

_"I hadn't forgotten anything," Maggie reassured her, hugging her tightly again, and drew back only a little to hold Dana to her as well. _

_"That which we've labeled 'strange' is usually what we don't understand," Dana said. "It doesn't mean it doesn't exist or can't happen."_

_A twinned pair of serious blue stares, and she wakes up.

* * *

_

Two months after her daughter had died, her doorbell rang. Missy and Dana watched her, as always, smiling something different. _You'll see._

She sighed heavily as she answered the door, before her eyes widened.

"Fox?"

For there he was, dressed ridiculously in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt and a New York baseball cap fitted backwards on his head. He'd grown a beard and mustache, and she nearly didn't recognize him. But he grinned goofily, and Maggie saw the man her daughter had fallen in love with. Her heart sank at the realization of what it had fallen to her to tell him.

"Hi, Mrs. Scully," he said, as she enveloped him in a hug he always received and returned shyly. It always made her wonder how his own mother had hugged him.

"Come in, please," she said, and sighed again.

He stepped in, smiling again, and in the darkness, Maggie was able to see the profile of a woman; short, slender, chilly in the night weather as she clutched her coat to her. Moonlight glinted off thinned and sleek brown hair in a long cut. She looked at Fox questioningly, who merely tilted his head. "Please," she said, bemused, opening the door a little wider and gesturing inside, keeping her eyes on the woman as she entered, and was rewarded by a flash of piercing blue and tired lines as she stepped into the lighter indoors.

Her breath caught in her chest, her heart constricting, and she couldn't breathe. She stepped closer to touch her, clutching her face between her palms, running a hand over her forehead, smoothing hair that was different but _hers_, and Maggie quenched the fear in her daughter's eyes by clutching her to herself.

"Dana," she choked out, cradling her head.

"Mom," her daughter said, gripping her every bit as tightly.

* * *

"Coffee, Fox?" she asked gently, trying not to disturb the man too much out of his thoughts. 

As it was, a lesser man would have jumped; his eyes refocused and turned to hers. "Yes, thank you, Mrs. Scully."

She put on the coffee, and took a seat next to him, staring out at the early morning darkness together.

"Do you really think we'll never see each other again?" she asked softly, but she was talking about herself and her daughter, who she assumed was still asleep in the next room, and he understood that.

He took in a breath. "Truthfully, I don't know. But I think you should be prepared for it. We've been tipped to get out of the country – and maybe if we do, they'll leave us alone. I can't say for sure." He turned to look at her, and she met his gaze. "I'm just sorry I dragged Dana into this. I'd never want to see her hurt - "

"I know that," she assured him. "Do what you have to do to keep her safe."

She had always found it vaguely amusing that they persisted in calling each other by their last names; and especially Fox, who always referred to and addressed her daughter as 'Scully' except when he was talking to Maggie. It was something she supposed she'd never figure out, and she supposed it really didn't matter when they infused their last names with the emotion and meaning she doubted at this point their first names would ever have.

She drifted off that night, finally, at Fox's insistence, and after his reassurance that they wouldn't leave before saying goodbye. She passed the room Dana was sleeping in to briefly check in on her, a practice she hadn't been able to continue since she'd left for pre-med school all those years ago. A gentle hand ran softly over her cheek, and she stirred only slightly, turning toward her before settling back into a deep sleep. Fox nodded to her as she passed him on her way to her own room.

Alone, they grieved for children they'd given up that they might live. And for once, instead of mourning her daughter, she mourned _for_ her daughter.

Dana lived. It was enough.

In the morning, she couldn't recall her dreams.

_fin_


End file.
